15 December 2015

9 Potent & Effective Web Design Principals for 2016

We are nearly at the close of another year and as 2016 looms closely in the background we wanted to look at how design principals will change.

For web developers keeping a finger firmly on the pulse is all that matters, and be on top of those conversion boosting tactics is what helps the bottom line of company figures.

What you have to remember is that web design Arizona comes as part of marketing, maybe not as direct as inbound marketing itself but keeping things simple for the user is what makes results stand out.

1. Divine Proportions

The one thing that we all think of is aesthetically pleasing designs that make everything in proportion to each other. This in itself is a form of art and it comes down to a formula called the golden ratio which is actually part of rich architectural history. You only need to look at buildings such as the Pantheon from Ancient Greece to get an example of this ratio at work, and for web design its closer than you think. Just take a look at Twitter.

2. Don’t Make Users Think

A clearly, well thought out web design shouldn’t make users think or get confused on where to go. It’s simple really, you just have to follow users’ habits to get it right and this is where usability and conversion rates really come into their own.

Think about it, we all search for something that we find useful or interesting and if something stands out it instantly becomes clickable. Once a user has clicked it they need expectations to be met, and this is where you need to guide a user to getting to that end result quickly, before they bounce away.

3. Visual Hierarchy

A common concept which we see in web design that will only become more important in 2016. This is where you make the most compelling and important parts of your website stand out. It takes some planning and execution at this stage, especially for the larger organisations with vast amounts of pages. What you need to target here is the area where you can turn customers into leads, where you can make sales without the customer making too many clicks.

In 2016 call to action buttons and important links should become a solid part of your web design.

4. The Rule of Thirds

In 2016 images are going to play a phenomenal part to web design conceptand the principles of the rule of thirds will help communicate your ideas without writing down a thing. Visualcommunications are a faster way to represent your ideas, products, services and much more. As explained by Web design Pheonixthe rule essentially takes an image and then divides into nine equally sized sections, and what makes this important is that the important parts of the image should be placed on the intersections and lines to make the image more appealing.

5. White Space and Clean Designs

Finally we touch on every web designer’s favourite concept and principle, white space. This has been bandied around for many years now in the web design world but 2016 is going to provide a year where negative space is going to turn into a positive addition to a web design strategy. White space allows for a cleaner and pleasant experience for the user and by cancelling out the barrage of text and graphics that make a site busy and cluttered.

6. Hick’s Law

One of the most important design principals is how a customer’s journey carries on throughout a given page on the site. This law focuses on choices and the increased time required for customers to make a decision.

To put it in simple terms, the more choices there are, the more chance of not selecting anything or taking a long while to select something. Less choice, means that more people will have an enjoyable experience on your site and convert higher.

You can work around this by adding in filters to help lessen the confusion for customers.

7. Gestalt Designs

Effective web design principles for 2016 don’t come much more potent than the set of gestalt designs. These are made up of 8 laws which allow us to predict how people will perceive something. In this design group you have the laws of proximity, similarity, closure, symmetry, common fate, continuity, figure and ground and the law of good. All these design laws are useful to know in 2016 as they all help increase visual perception and conversion rates.

8. Occam’s Razor

To explain this specific design principle, it works on the basis that the simplest solution to a problem is always going to be the best result. In practice you will see this on many websites in 2016 as homepages become more condensed with the amount of information that is left on them. Content and clutter is removed in order to make homepages much simpler, and in most cases offer a few CTA buttons and a small amount of text.

What this results in, is much higher conversion rates.

9. Patience is a Virtue

Finally, patience is a key part in all of our lives but when overstretched it can often leave us angry, irritable. That’s why it’s important to allow users the chance to explore your site and look at your services in detail without the need to fill out long tedious web forms.

If anything you should only be asking for a username, password and email address which is just a reasonable practice for them to test something out and then you as the webmaster get their data in order to communicate when a final version has been completed.

All of these principles are going to be a key player in website conversions in 2016, so make sure that you have implemented these into your strategy.